US Senate report details dating-app romance scams as Match Group disputes findings

The report is the result of an investigation by the US Congress’s joint economic committee, led by senators Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, and Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, into romance scams on Match Group platforms. Match Group operates Tinder, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, Match and other apps. When the investigation launched last September, the senators said romance scams, in which fraudsters form relationships to induce money or gifts from victims, had become a leading form of financial fraud in the United States and cost Americans at least $1.3 billion annually.

According to the report, internal documents provided by Match Group showed that as of the second half of 2025, Tinder had not updated most of its machine learning models in years. As a result, the report said, Tinder detected scammers and other bad actors less reliably and struggled to keep pace with emerging threats. Data provided by Match Group also showed that nearly 500,000 of the accounts that matched with users exchanged contact information with another user through the third quarter of 2025.

Mary, who asked that her last name be withheld, told The Guardian she met a man on Plenty of Fish in 2024. She said she had been looking for a connection but became the victim of a romance scam that cost her almost $100,000. “There was a lot of conversation, and then it started with the constant contact, pressure and repeated asks for money,” Mary said in an interview on Tuesday. “It just escalated really, really quickly.”

Mary said the man contacted her constantly and knew where she lived. He told her he needed money for work-related things and medical emergencies, she said. In total, she said she sent him about $100,000 in cryptocurrency payments. After realizing he was a scammer, she blocked his number; he then switched phone numbers and contacted her again.

“They never leave you alone,” she said. “I call it like being in a vortex. You don’t even realise what’s happening. You’re sending money, and it’s adding up, but each one of those times that you send money, it’s, like, not connected to the other times. But finally when I realized how much money I lost, I was like: ‘Whoa.’”

Mary has since sought to identify the people behind the fraud and discovered other Plenty of Fish profiles using the same photos as the man she had talked to. She reported them to the platform. “If you knew me, you would say she would never do that,” Mary said, adding that she struggles to understand how it happened but believes it is “really a lot about force of control.”

The report said that since the investigation launched last September, Match Group has introduced and expanded measures designed to combat scams, including a facial verification feature on Tinder across the US that requires all new Tinder users to complete a video selfie verification process. In a news release on Tuesday, Hassan and committee Democrats added that Match Group also instituted new efforts designed to remove harmful accounts more effectively, including a new AI model in the first half of 2025 that examines profiles and other information to detect scammers and other bad actors.

“It is encouraging that following committee outreach, Match Group introduced new AI models,” the report states. However, it adds that those changes came after a prolonged period during which scams continued to proliferate on Tinder.

In response to the report, Yoel Roth, Match Group’s senior vice-president of trust and safety, said in a statement: “We’re grateful the committee recognized our significant advancements to protect our users against romance scams.” He said: “That said, the report mischaracterizes both the historical scale of our investment and the work already complete. Alongside our engagement with the Committee over the past year, we’ve made the largest safety advancements in Match Group’s history. Trust and safety is a foundational priority, and we intend to continue leading the industry in building tools that promote authentic, safe connections.”

Much of the safety work, including face check, was already under way before the committee’s investigation, Match Group told NBC News.

In June, Hassan introduced legislation with Republican senator Rick Scott that would establish a central portal for Americans to report scams and get the help they need from law enforcement and agencies. Hassan, in a statement with the release of the report on Tuesday, described romance scams as devastating, both financially and emotionally, to people who are looking for connection.